[...] But I kept leafing distractedly through the papers, unable to give world affairs my full attention. I asked myself what right I had in a world like this to worry so intensely about myself, to be so obsessed by what would happen to me and whether I had any right to care so much about my own life … With so many millions of people living in fear and misery, should I really be worrying about whether I really owned every last little bit of my husband’s heart? What was my husband’s secret, or my personal happiness, compared to the world’s secrets, the world’s misery? What was I doing playing detective in a world that is savage enough, frightening and mysterious enough, already? … But these were pseudo-questions, you know, pretenses … One woman’s feelings don’t amount to an entire world. Then I thought back to what the old priest had said, and wondered if he was right. Maybe I didn’t have enough faith, enough humility … Perhaps there was something arrogant about me, something unworthy of a Christian, a woman, indeed of a human being; something arrogant about this crazy project, this amateur-detective attempt to scrape away the surface of a private world and reveal my husband’s secret; something unworthy about trying to find that certain mysterious person with her lilac ribbon. Perhaps … but I was so overwrought at the time I can no longer explain my feelings clearly.